On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M. Pérez CollectionChapter 2: Abstracting History: September 22, 2017–January 7, 2018Chapter 3: Domestic Anxieties: January 19–April 8, 2018
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) presents On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, an exhibition of over 170 works of art, spanning painting, drawing, photography, mixed-media and sculpture. The exhibition—PAMM’s largest dedicated Cuban art exhibition to date—is presented in three parts over the course of a year, and features a rich panorama of recent work produced by artists living both in Cuba and abroad. On the Horizon celebrates the recent generous gift of Cuban artworks donated to the museum by Jorge M. Pérez in December 2016, and includes a significant number of recent acquisitions purchased during the last year with funds provided as part of Pérez’s donation.

The selection includes multiple images of the horizon, and these works serve to structure the conceptual framework of the exhibition. The diverse meanings placed on the horizon—which include it as a symbol of longing, containment, or desire—radiate across the additional works on view. Produced in various media, such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation, these contemplative artworks help generate a discussion regarding the specificities of Cuba’s current physical, social, and political environment, as revealed through each artist’s personal experience and unique aesthetics.

On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection is organized by PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander. This exhibition is presented by City National Bank with additional support provided by Cidade Matarazzo, Crystal & Co., and Pomellato.

Haroon Mizra: A C I D G E S TJuly 21, 2017–July 29, 2018
Haroon Mirza (b. 1977, London; lives in London) is a multimedia artist who works with audiovisual materials, electronic equipment, amplifiers, and found objects to create immersive environments and kinetic sculptures. His work amplifies phenomena that are often imperceptible––such as electricity––and seeks to create or distort the relationship between optics and acoustics, giving unexpected visual and sensorial analogs to what we hear. Mirza uses a particular visual and material vocabulary to modify architectural spaces, including colored neon and sculptural acoustic foam, creating installations that offer a precise, highly mediated experience of sound and light.

PAMM has commissioned Mirza to produce a new work for its double-height gallery. For this project, A C I D G E S T, he created a specialized technical system that transmits an electrical current through speakers and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that act in coordination with one another so that different colors are activated by corresponding noise frequencies. This system produces a choreographed experience of sound and light based on a concrete poem the artist has created, which serves as a score for a dynamic installation that redefines our phenomenological experience of the space.

Haroon Mirza: A C I D G E S T is organized by PAMM Associate Curator Diana Nawi. This exhibition is presented by John Varvatos with additional support provided by Knight Foundation.

Within GenresAugust 25, 2017–August 19, 2018
The Pérez Art Museum Miami collection focuses on modern and contemporary art. While it includes examples from as early as the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of the artwork housed in the collection is by living artists and has been produced during the last several decades. While this emphasis on contemporary artistic practices informs the museum’s collecting and programming, the museum continually looks to emphasize connections between our current moment and a longer history of art.

Informed by these interests in art history, the current presentation of the permanent collection is organized around the historical criteria of genres within Western painting and the traditional hierarchy of genres that developed out of the Renaissance period and was promoted within European art academies up through the 19th century. The five genres explored in these galleries, Still Life, Landscape, Scenes of Everyday Life, Portraiture, and History Painting developed as categories when painting was still in its infancy as a respected medium. Each category was meant to highlight the intellectual rigor of the medium. The hierarchy that formed between genres placed still life at the lowest end of the intellectual spectrum, as it involved the representation of inanimate objects, and history painting at the highest level of artistic achievement, as it depicted human subjects involved in allegorical themes related to religion, mythology, or historical events.

Within Genres is organized by PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander.

Dara Friedman: Perfect StrangerNovember 3, 2017–March 4, 2018
PAMM presents the first major career survey of the work of Dara Friedman (b. 1968, Bad Kreuznach, Germany; lives in Miami). Friedman is best known for film and video installations that combine the techniques and principles of Structural filmmaking with a strong emotional charge and an intuitive approach to subject matter. Her work unravels cinematic conventions, laying bare the materiality and mechanics of film production while harnessing the accidents that occur as light passes through lens and celluloid. The results strip away and demystify film’s illusionistic tendencies, while distilling uncanny fragments from the ordinary world and transforming everyday sights and sounds into the raw material for sensual—often euphoric—encounters. Perfect Stranger, Friedman’s largest museum show to date, also marks the largest exhibition of a Miami-based artist organized by PAMM

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color, bilingual catalogue.

Dara Friedman: Perfect Stranger is organized by PAMM Curator René Morales and presented by Citi with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Lead individual support received from Dennis Richard and Susan Bell Richard, Mark and Nedra Oren, and George Lindemann. Support from Veuve Clicquot is also gratefully acknowledged.

Steve McQueen: End CreditsNovember 17, 2017–March 11, 2018
Steve McQueen (b. 1969, London; lives in Amsterdam and London) is a film director, producer, screenwriter, and video artist, whose work focuses on historical narratives, politics, race, and other themes concerning a deep social consciousness. In the video installation End Credits, McQueen pays homage to the African American singer, actor, and Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976). An anti-imperialist committed to fighting inequality, Robeson was watched in the 1950s and blacklisted by the FBI—a government organization that kept an extensive archive on the Civil Rights leader and mass media performer. During the McCarthy era, the FBI compiled thousands of pages on Robeson, now a public archive which McQueen used to create the video, End Credits. This work shows the significantly censored pages read by male and female voices. McQueen creates a compelling visual composition that brings forth the perverse nature of politically driven discrimination and persecution.

Steve McQueen: End Credits is organized by PAMM Associate Curator María Elena Ortiz. This exhibition is presented by Bank of America with additional support provided by Knight Foundation.

From the truer world of the other: Typewriter Art from PAMM’s CollectionNovember 17, 2017–April 15, 2018
This exhibition presents a selection of works acquired from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry through a combined gift and purchase made possible by the generosity of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Ruth and Marvin A. Sackner, and the Sackner Family Partnership. Featuring the work of approximately 15 individuals—including Carl Andre, Henri Chopin, Dom Sylvester Houédard, d. a. levy, Françoise Mairey, and Gustave Morin—the exhibition explores how artists and poets have transformed the typewriter, a machine for office work, into a tool for experimental artistic and poetic expression. Harnessing the machine’s inherent precision while defying its physical limits, these artists create a dizzying array of optical effects and novel forms of geometric abstraction.

From the truer world of the other: Typewriter Art from PAMM’s Collection is organized by PAMM Assistant Curator Jennifer Inacio and PAMM Curator René Morales.

The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of WarFebruary 16–August 12, 2018
Originally organized as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty, this is the first solo exhibition of the Argentinian artist León Ferrari (b. 1920, Buenos Aires; d. 2013, Buenos Aires) in the United States, and features the first full performance of his seminal 1967 publication Palabras ajenas (The Words of Others). The exhibition focuses primarily on Ferrari’s influential practice from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on Ferrari’s literary collages, most notably Palabras ajenas, an important Vietnam era anti-war piece written in the form of a dramatic script.

Ferrari considered his literary collages to be a central element of his practice, yet many remained unpublished or had only minimal circulation as limited editions or as sketchbooks. The exhibit re-visits many of these works, exploring an uncharted territory while marking a turning point in both the understanding of his work, as well as the aesthetic forms of political intervention that emerged in Latin America. This profoundly contemporary project highlights the obscenity of war, the ways the media represents it, and the role of political and religious discourse in the expansion of Western culture.

The Words of Others: León FerrariandRhetoric in Times of War is curated by Ruth Estévez, curator and director of the Gallery at REDCAT; Miguel A. López, director of TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica; and Agustín Díez Fischer, director Fundación Espigas in Buenos Aires. Andrea Giunta served as advisor. It is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty. Support for this exhibition and publication is provided through grants from the Getty Foundation. Special thanks to Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari, Arte y Acervo (FALFAA) and Silvia and Hugo Sigman Collection, Buenos Aires. The presentation of this exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami is coordinated by PAMM Assistant Curator Jennifer Inacio.

The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary ArtApril 6–September 2, 2018The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art is an art-based exhibition on the subject of soccer, or fútbol, and its interactions with societies around the world. Planned to overlap with the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the exhibition will explore how the sport has stimulated artists to reflect upon its implications on society. With approximately twenty artists working in video, photography, painting, and sculpture, the aim of this exhibition is to create an experience where the viewer/spectator can use a universal theme to engage with the work of contemporary artists from around the world. Through visual art, PAMM seeks to present the art form of soccer—a place where social, cultural, and political issues of identity, nationalism, globalism, and mass spectacle play out vibrantly. The exhibition celebrates the commonality of human experience through a sport that has been one of the few common languages worldwide.

The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art is organized by PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans with the support of PAMM Assistant Curator Jennifer Inacio. This exhibition is supported by Stephen M. Ross and Relevent Sports, LLC.

william cordova
now's the time: narratives of southern alchemyApril 27–October 17, 2018
This exhibition is the first extensive museum survey of cultural practitioner William Cordova (b. 1969, Lima; lives in Miami, Lima, and New York). It presents a selection of works embodying the three main themes that have inspired the work of this celebrated Miami artist for decades: transmission, alchemy, and transcendence. In his nationally and internationally recognized drawings, sculptures, installations, and collaborative projects, Cordova collapses linear concepts of time and history to address contemporary notions of displacement. He extensively researches symbols and artifacts from different cultures and times, ignoring the boundaries between the past and the present. Then, he uses ephemeral and precarious materials to create elegant works that challenge traditional Western typologies. Striving to create a flexible and critical space for the understanding of our contemporary moment, he builds bridges between “apparently” separate narratives, such as contemporary hip-hop culture, African artifacts, and the pre-Columbian history of the Incas. This exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum catalogue.

Sid GrossmanMay 18–October 28, 2018
Sid Grossman (b. 1913, New York; d. 1955, Provincetown, Massachusetts) was a founding member of the Photo League, a group of primarily Jewish photographers active in New York who used their medium to shed light on issues of social inequality in the urban environment. Grossman created humanizing and intimate documentary portraits of everyday people on the street and experimented with more artful, stylized image making as well.

Drawing from PAMM’s collection, this exhibition presents a series of photographs of New York—specifically the Lower East Side—depicting street scenes, tenements and architecture, and daily life. A selection of photographs produced while Grossman was stationed in Panama will also be presented along with additional works from a trip he took in the early 1940s to document life in the Dust Bowl. This exhibition focuses on Grossman’s overall body of work and his move between socially focused documentary photography to experimental approaches.

About PAMM
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) promotes artistic expression and the exchange of ideas, advancing public knowledge and appreciation of art, architecture and design, and reflecting the diverse community of its pivotal geographic location at the crossroads of the Americas. A nearly 35-year-old South Florida institution formerly known as Miami Art Museum (MAM), Pérez Art Museum Miami opened a new building, designed by world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron, in Downtown Miami’s Museum Park on December 4, 2013. The facility is a state-of-the-art model for sustainable museum design and progressive programming and features 200,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor program space with flexible galleries; shaded outdoor verandas; a waterfront restaurant and bar; a museum shop; and an education center with a library, media lab and classroom spaces. For more information, please visit www.pamm.org, find us on Facebook (facebook.com/perezartmuseummiami), or follow us on Twitter/Instagram (@pamm).